‘BETTER Than Chocolate” boasts a fresh collection of characters whose world is centered on a lesbian bookshop in Vancouver and some sex scenes during the first act that are genuinely hot stuff. So it’s a shame that this romantic comedy from Canada gradually degenerates into a clich-ridden mess at once syrupy and cheesy.

By the end, you wonder if the filmmakers weren’t following the instructions laid down in some Big Book of Gay Movie Clichs – late ’80s edition. And it’s not just the compulsory climactic gay-bashing scene or the predictable Lilith Fair score (the title comes from the Sarah McLachlan song “ice cream”).

College dropout Maggie (Karyn Dwyer), who is supposed to be only 19 and has great curly, red hair, works at Ten Per Cent Books and sleeps on a couch in the back.

The imminent arrival in town of her mother and brother prompts Maggie to get a huge sublet, but the night before moving in, she hooks up with Kim (Christina Cox), a tough, nomadic artist who saves her from some skinheads.

Kim has already moved in, and the two women are enjoying a shower together when mother and 17-year-old brother turn up.

By the next morning, brother Paul (Kevin Mundy) has figured out what’s going on. But Maggie’s mom, Lila (Wendy Crewson, overacting wildly), is too grotesquely stupid to figure it out.

Maggie’s unexplained reluctance to confess her orientation to Lila (even though everyone else in town, including the local skinheads, know that she’s “out”) then becomes the dilemma that is supposed to drive the plot.

The problem is that Maggie has no reason not to tell Lila the truth. And in any case, Lila is so unbelievably, irritatingly clueless that there’s no chance she’ll ever put two and two together by herself.

In fact, mom seems to have wandered in from another movie and another time.She becomes friends with tall, deep-voiced male-to-female transsexual Judy, and it just doesn’t occur to her that Judy (Peter Outerbridge) might once have been a man.

Perhaps this ludicrous portrayal of an ultra-straight “straight” plays OK in a small, Canadian gay community, but in New York it – and the movie – comes off as embarrassingly provincial.It’s a shame because there’s real chemistry between the two leads (you have to take it on trust that they share true love rather than mere horniness). And there are also some promising subplots, including a possible romance between uptight bookstore owner Frances and Judy, an affair between pansexual bookstore worker Carla (Marya Delver) and Paul, and a conflict with the Canadian customs over the importation of lesbian porn from the United States.

“Better Than Chocolate” is well-filmed and for the most part well-acted. But its technical professionalism only serves to make the amateurishly crude patches of Maggie Thompson’s script more obvious.